We’ve launched new features in Google Cloud Storage that make it easier to manage objects, and faster to access and upload data. With a tiny bit of upfront configuration, you can take advantage of these improvements with no changes to your application code — and we know that one thing better than improving your app is improving your app transparently!

Object Lifecycle ManagementObject Lifecycle Management allows you to define policies that allow Cloud Storage to automatically delete objects based on certain conditions. For example, you could configure a bucket so objects older than 365 days are deleted, or only keep the 3 most recent versions of objects in a versioned bucket. Once you have configured Lifecycle Management, the expected expiration time will be added to object metadata when possible, and all operations are logged in the access log.

Object Lifecycle Management can be used with Object Versioning to limit the number of older versions of your objects that are retained. This can help keep your apps cost-efficient while maintaining a level of protection against accidental data loss due to user application bugs or manual user errors.

Regional BucketsRegional Buckets allow you to co-locate your Durable Reduced Availability data in the same region as your Google Compute Engine instances. Since Cloud Storage buckets and Compute Engine instances within a region share the same network fabric, this can reduce latency and increase bandwidth to your virtual machines, and may be particularly appropriate for data-intensive computations. You can still specify the less-granular United States or European datacenter locations if you'd like your data spread over multiple regions, which may be a better fit for content distribution use cases.

gsutil - Automatic Parallel Composite UploadsGsutil version 3.34 now automatically uploads large objects in parallel for higher throughput. Achieving maximum TCP throughput on most networks requires multiple connections, and this makes it easy and automatic. The support is built using Composite Objects. For details about temporary objects and a few caveats, see the Parallel Composite Uploads documentation. To get started, simply use 'gsutil cp' as usual. Large files are automatically uploaded in parallel.

We think there’s a little something here for everyone: If you’re managing temporary or versioned objects, running compute jobs over Cloud Storage data, or using gsutil to upload data, you’ll want to take advantage of these features right away. We hope you enjoy them!